People and businesses often prefer to sell and buy locally. This preference may exist due to any of a variety of reasons, for example, security and trust concerns, perishability of certain goods, a “buy local” socioeconomic philosophy, or higher marketing, transactional and shipping costs associated with selling goods to buyers at distant locations. Additionally, selling and purchasing locally may often make sense where a person or business only has a single item or a limited number of items to sell, or where a business has a physical inventory or a business presence in a particular geographical area. Both individuals and businesses have traditionally taken advantage of classified advertisements as an effective form of local marketing.
For many years, classified advertisements (also known as “classified ads” or “classifieds”) have been distributed in print form—often as tersely worded captions in back pages of newspapers and magazines or in publications wholly dedicated to this advertising genre. Advertisers are often charged to place print classified ads based on the length of the ad and/or the length of time the ad will run. Advertisers may also be charged extra for prominent ad placement, to include a photograph, for color, or for other features. In any case, classified ads are often categorized for browsing ease.
With the rise of the internet, online classified advertising has thrived. Classified ads listings may be found among the web pages of local news outlets, on general-purpose classified advertisement web sites such as CRAIGSLIST.ORG, or on sites focused on one particular class of goods or services, such as CARS.COM. Through online outlets such as these, users can advertise their items to their local market at a low cost or in some instances for free. In some cases, users may use online classified advertising to advertise both locally and to a much larger geographical area at little or no extra cost. Online classified advertisements are often categorized much as is done in print classifieds. Additionally, the ads are also often searchable.
In contrast to print and online classified advertisements, television advertising has in many instances only been attractive to businesses whose strategy involves the mass marketing of a given product, service, or brand to a large television audience. The high costs of television advertising airtime, the limited duration of television advertisements, and the time, cost and effort involved in producing quality video advertisements have all traditionally limited the value and feasibility of using television as a means to distribute some of the types of advertisements that typically appear in classified advertisement publications and web sites.